Superconvergence for Neumann boundary control problems governed by semilinear elliptic equations

This paper is concerned with the discretization error analysis of semilinear Neumann boundary control problems in polygonal domains with pointwise inequality constraints on the control. The approximations of the control are piecewise constant functions. The state and adjoint state are discretized by piecewise linear finite elements. In a postprocessing step approximations of locally optimal controls of the continuous optimal control problem are constructed by the projection of the respective discrete adjoint state. Although the quality of the approximations is in general affected by corner singularities a convergence order of $h^2|\ln h|^{3/2}$ is proven for domains with interior angles smaller than $2\pi/3$ using quasi-uniform meshes. For larger interior angles mesh grading techniques are used to get the same order of convergence

A FEM for an optimal control problem of fractional powers of elliptic operators

We study solution techniques for a linear-quadratic optimal control problem involving fractional powers of elliptic operators. These fractional operators can be realized as the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map for a nonuniformly elliptic problem posed on a semi-infinite cylinder in one more spatial dimension. Thus, we consider an equivalent formulation with a nonuniformly elliptic operator as state equation. The rapid decay of the solution to this problem suggests a truncation that is suitable for numerical approximation. We discretize the proposed truncated state equation using first degree tensor product finite elements on anisotropic meshes. For the control problem we analyze two approaches: one that is semi-discrete based on the so-called variational approach, where the control is not discretized, and the other one is fully discrete via the discretization of the control by piecewise constant functions. For both approaches, we derive a priori error estimates with respect to the degrees of freedom. Numerical experiments validate the derived error estimates and reveal a competitive performance of anisotropic over quasi-uniform refinement

A piecewise linear FEM for an optimal control problem of fractional operators: error analysis on curved domains

We propose and analyze a new discretization technique for a linear-quadratic optimal control problem involving the fractional powers of a symmetric and uniformly elliptic second oder operator; control constraints are considered. Since these fractional operators can be realized as the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map for a nonuniformly elliptic equation, we recast our problem as a nonuniformly elliptic optimal control problem. The rapid decay of the solution to this problem suggests a truncation that is suitable for numerical approximation. We propose a fully discrete scheme that is based on piecewise linear functions on quasi-uniform meshes to approximate the optimal control and first-degree tensor product functions on anisotropic meshes for the optimal state variable. We provide an a priori error analysis that relies on derived Holder and Sobolev regularity estimates for the optimal variables and error estimates for an scheme that approximates fractional diffusion on curved domains; the latter being an extension of previous available results. The analysis is valid in any dimension. We conclude by presenting some numerical experiments that validate the derived error estimates

Optimal control of fractional semilinear PDEs

In this paper we consider the optimal control of semilinear fractional PDEs with both spectral and integral fractional diffusion operators of order $2s$ with $s \in (0,1)$. We first prove the boundedness of solutions to both semilinear fractional PDEs under minimal regularity assumptions on domain and data. We next introduce an optimal growth condition on the nonlinearity to show the Lipschitz continuity of the solution map for the semilinear elliptic equations with respect to the data. We further apply our ideas to show existence of solutions to optimal control problems with semilinear fractional equations as constraints. Under the standard assumptions on the nonlinearity (twice continuously differentiable) we derive the first and second order optimality conditions